Monday, March 6, 2017

Walking away from the no-choice duopoly

Trump’s
popularity increased the more the establishment
condemned him. This would have sent a profound
and disturbing message to anyone not as clueless
as our liberal elites. They did not get it. They
thought they could trot out Bill Clinton, Barack
Obama and Hollywood celebrities and get the
rubes to fall for their routine one more time.
They thought the country would again obey.
The liberal class, by embracing neoliberalism
and refusing to challenge the imperial wars,
empowered the economic and political structures
that destroyed our democracy and gave rise to
Trump. Multiculturalism, when it means, to use
the words of
Cornel West,
nothing more than having a president who is a
“black mascot for Wall Street,” betrays the
disenfranchised and endows the ruling elites
with a false progressivism, a false humanism and
a false inclusiveness. Hillary
and Bill Clinton, Joe Biden and the current
Democratic Party leadership designed and built
the massive system of imprisonment, essentially
ended welfare, expanded our wars and pushed
through NAFTA. They destroyed the lives of
hundreds of thousands of poor and working-class
families and are responsible for the mounds of
corpses in the Middle East. Yet these liberal
elites speak as if they are champions of racial
and economic justice. They appear in
choreographed pseudo-events to demonstrate a
faux compassion. Now they have been exposed as
fakes. A
genuine populism, one defined and often
articulated by Bernie Sanders, could sweep the
Democratic Party back into power. Regulating
Wall Street, publicly financing campaigns,
forgiving student debt, demanding universal
health care, bailing out homeowners victimized
by the banks, ending the wars in the Middle
East, instituting a jobs program to repair our
decaying infrastructure, dismantling the prison
system, restoring the rule of law on the streets
of our cities, making college education free and
protecting programs such as Social Security
would see election victory after election
victory.

I agree with that and agree with similar comments made in "Roundtable."

Jess: I'd agree. Take an idiot like Alyssa Milano, she promotes The
White Helmets because she's too stupid to realize they're a propaganda
front. She promotes that, her every day is about anti-Trump Tweets. I
suppose it plays to the politically stupid but what she fails to grasp
is that the Democrats (a) are not an answer as the last decades have
demonstrated and that (b) many of us live far beyond the two party
duopoly.
Jim: Especially in the current environment where Democrats do nothing
but harp on Russia. Is that their answer to the economy? Is that
what's going to win over voters? It's paranoia and it sounds nutty.
Ty: Let's talk about issues. Jessica Lange, Sissy Spacek talking about
the foreclosures on American farms, that's an issue. Jane Fonda talking
about rape and abuse? That's an issue. Susan Sarandon speaking out
against the Iraq War? That's an issue.
Jess: And issues matter. Let's use your last example, Susan Sarandon.
She got attacked viciously for speaking out against the Iraq War. And
that could go to the point about getting attacked because you have
power. That said, I think even some of the people who attacked her back
then respect her now. She spoke about something that mattered. It was
a real issue. She showed integrity.
Dona: Whining about Hillary Clinton losing does not show integrity.
She's a War Hawk and a liar. The party needed a better candidate and
should have gone with Bernie over her. Hillary lost because she's a
loser with endless baggage. People seemed to think that we had no
choice and we would just vote for her regardless.

C.I.: On that, I don't think they get your generation at all.

Ava: I would agree with that. We're the generation who grew up with gay
as not shocking. We're the generation that grew up with war is wrong.
And we grew up with people like Susan Sarandon drawin lines -- rightly,
that's not an insult to her. So this idea that we'll just do as we're
told and vote for who we're told to? I'm sorry, we're not scared little
bunnies who grew up in the shadow of McCarthy and nuclear war. We're
not brainwashed. That's what they don't get about their Russia
bulls**t. It works well for the elderly like Nancy Pelosi. But they
can't grasp that our entire lives has not been about hating 'the other.'

C.I.: And the campaign for Hillary, let's be honest, wasn't about
promises to voters, it was about creating 'the other.' She was too
self-involved to realize she needed to appeal to voters.

Jim: Exactly. There was no campaign. There was no effort to appeal.
It was all about crooked Hillary is owed this and Donald Trump is evil.
That was the whole slogan.

Ty: And we're the generation that can't be scared into being good little sheep.

Dona: They don't get it. They really don't. They think they're the
only show in town even though we've had decades of people dropping out
of the voting process because they don't believe in it.

Above is a photo of Jassem Mohammed Al Jaff, the Minister of
Displacement and Migration. And he's blaming the United Nations for the
refugee crisis. As his title indicates, he's actually the person who
should be planning for refugees.

As we've repeatedly said for months now, Roth is allowing politics to cloud his judgments.

He's the only one seeing tears of joy in that photo.

What he should be seeing is shame in his own reflection.

He's gone around the bend, completely nuts, his Twitter feed is as out of control as US President Donald Trump's Twitter feed.

The photo was taken by REUTERS' Goran Tomasevic and is one of at least
four photos of the father and daughter that Tomasevic took. In no
caption to these photos has REUETERS claimed tears of joy. Only Ken
Roth sees that.

“While politicians in Baghdad are discussing reconciliation efforts in
Iraq, the state’s own forces are undermining those efforts by destroying
homes and forcing families into a detention camp,” said Lama Fakih,
deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “These families,
accused of wrongdoing by association, are in many cases themselves
victims of ISIS abuses and should be protected by government forces, not
targeted for retribution.”

“America has lost a lot of potential friends here in the region. …
and this is something that the new administration has to address.”Obama’s principal error, says Allawi, was his
disengagement from a country and a region which desperately needed U.S.
support. At a time when Iraq couldn’t stand on its own, Obama left --
leaving a vacuum for Iran to fill. Iran’s new influence, he says, is
behind much of the bloodshed.

“When our American friends left Iraq in 2011 they
never laid down the issues that would strengthen the Iraqis to face the
challenges ahead -- their sudden withdrawal in 2011 without the
necessary preparation left us many problems to face.

To be clear, FOX NEWS is confused about Allawi. Both on air and in
their write up, they have the wrong time period for when Allawi was
prime minister. From June of 2004 to May of 2005 was when Ayad Allawi
was prime minister.

Benjamin Hall: In 2010, he won the election, he had more seats, but
the Obama administration pressured him to hand over power to the Maliki
government -- the Iranian-backed Maliki government. He says that that
was the turning point, that was when things changed. Yes, I think he
probably could have been a unifier. He talked openly about working with
Sunni and Shia and Kurds and we know how the Maliki government ended up
being very close to Iran, very sectarian. And so he says -- and I tend
to agree with him -- that was the turning point in the country.

And Ayad Allawi is correct.

It's a shame that this turning point took place with the western press ignoring it.

But that's what they did. Especially in the United States, where the
corporate press defined their mission as selling Barack Obama.

If a journalist managed to get the truth in print, it was in a book.
And then, though they might have been media darlings when Bully Boy
Bush occupied the White House, in the days of The Cult of St. Barack,
flesh peddlers like Charlie Rose couldn't find their numbers suddenly.

The FOX NEWS report is actually disappointing.

Was Ayad Allawi that circumspect or was a decision made not to really go into details?

Allawi wasn't just pressured by then-Vice President Joe Biden to
concede. There's also the issue of The Erbil Agreement -- the
US-brokered contract. Barack personally called Allawi to get him to
return to the Parliament and gave his promise that The Erbil Agreement
would be honored.

It wasn't.

And Barack didn't do a damn thing but act like he'd never heard of The Erbil Agreement.